“I dust a bit,” Ignatius told the policeman. “In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.” —Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
1.
As of this morning, Fuckleroy is still giving his speech at the RNC. Scott Dworkin wrote Trump clearly didn’t write the speech that he was reading like a robot staring at the teleprompter. It was emotionless, like a third grader forced to present a book report in front of the class. But it wasn’t long before the ranting and raving lunatic came out, and turned the whole thing into another Trump hate rally. A convicted felon and rapist who gets a possible ear wound is still a convicted felon and rapist. I would rather see this miserable man pay for his crimes with large financial penalties and jail time than be mercifully put out of our misery. Natural causes? I’m all in.
We are witnessing in real time justice crumbling before our eyes with the recent Supreme Court decisions and ‘Judge’ Cannon’s dismissal of the federal classified documents criminal case. In June 2023 a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 criminal counts under the Espionage Act, including scheming to conceal documents; three more charges were added the following month. Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence). ANY other person doing this would be at Guantanamo Bay by now.
Simon Rosenberg leans towards the positive, as do I, when he writes Wherever you are on the whether the President should keep running, there is no question that since the debate the President has been hustling, doing many public events, holding a major press conference, conducting other interviews, leading the world at NATO, Presidenting. By contrast, Trump has spoken at public events only three times since June 27th, and done no interviews with non-right wing media. I’m not sure there has been a period in the modern history of American politics where a major candidate for President has been so absent and silent for so long. I continue to believe that Trump’s terrible debate performance spooked his campaign, and they have been doing everything they can to keep him from the public since.
Donald Trump is weak not strong. He made a huge mistake in picking Vance. His agenda is extreme and deeply unpopular. He is a rapist, fraudster, traitor and felon. We can and should win this election if we all keep working hard.
Speaking of Vance, he’s even more worrisome than Fuckleroy as he’s much younger and able to string together complete sentences. HRC wrote that former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, who was drummed out of the party for standing against Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, wrote: “JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t—overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine. The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution.”
She goes on to write Trump’s selection of Vance reinforces that the MAGAs have taken over the Republican Party with an ideology that rejects democracy in favor of Christian nationalism. Vance has repeatedly elevated Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s destruction of democracy in favor of a strong leader imposing Christian family structures, ending abortion rights, enforcing anti-LGBTQ+ policies and encouraging attacks on immigrants, and seizing universities.
WaPo reported on Wednesday that Vance last year joined an effort to enforce the Comstock Act, the 151-year-old federal law that has become a lightning rod in the nation’s abortion debate. “We demand that you act swiftly and in accordance with the law, shut down all mail-order abortion operations,” Vance and about 40 fellow Republican lawmakers wrote. The Republicans called on the Justice Department to potentially prosecute physicians, pharmacists and others “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws,” citing additional federal laws that apply to criminal conspiracy and money laundering. (In an April interview with Time Magazine, Fuckleroy said of the Comstock Act that it was a “very important issue” and promised to issue a “big statement” within the next two weeks. Liar.)
And in his own words Vance seems to hate women and people who choose not to procreate: “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. and its just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.” Uhhhh, Buttigieg is a gay MAN, and also has twins with his husband Chasten. But I quibble…
It really comes down to whether we want to maintain a democracy or if we think it’s about time we had a King and an autocracy around here to tell us how to live. Thom Hartmann writes Republicans are so dedicated to keeping working class people poor and locked into their social strata they even went all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent President Biden from lessening the burden of student debt, a problem that literally does not exist in any other developed nation in the world. Similarly, last year there were about a half-million families destroyed by medical debt bankruptcy across the entire developed world; nearly every one of those was here in the US. When President Biden proposed simply blocking credit agencies from downgrading families with medical debt, Republicans immediately opposed his effort. When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery — opening the door to billionaires like Musk giving $45 million a month to Trump’s election efforts — they guaranteed that what remains of our democracy (we’re the only developed country in the world that allows such corruption) finds itself under continuous assault.
This morning Hartmann also wrote it’s important to acknowledge that this is no longer your (or my) father’s GOP. Vance is the pre-packaged, well-massaged “product” of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who are enamored of the writings of Ayn Rand and David Koch’s Libertarian movement. Trump has made it clear he’s happy to go along with the Galt’s Gulch crowd, particularly if it makes him more money. These men (they’re nearly all men) are revolutionaries with little regard for political history or norms. Think Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot, or Mussolini. They don’t want to tweak government; they want to burn it down and start it over from scratch. Rebuild it as a completely different system of governance.
Dada journalist Dash MacIntyre writes in his Substack that Autocracies and their nationalisms are mere façades for egotistical psychopaths to keep political power by any means necessary despite the inevitable subpar economic and social performances that come from just one temperamental person making all the decisions and allowing little or no dissension. Bad policies and worse ideas get repeated again and again as any dissent is seen as disloyalty and considered treasonous against the leader, the people, and the nation. Autocratic, nationalistic propaganda is ultimately a pandering carnival trick for morons, which is why it’s endlessly frustrating that voters in liberal democracies such as America, who enjoy the robust freedoms of consensus-driven policy changes, bureaucracy employee turnover, and law-based institutions, would be apologists for a murdering psychopath like Putin…and I will add, apologists for the likes of Fuckleroy, Vance, and entire Republican establishment who give support to these wanna-be dictators.
I’ll end this portion of today’s Dispatch with a quote by Stonekettle’s Jim Wright: Look left. Look right. Look in the mirror. If you and everyone around you are wearing adult diapers over American flag pants and you have a maxipad taped to the side of your head to show your allegiance to your leader, well, guess what? You're in a cult. A really, really shitty cult.
2.
Rebecca Solnit wrote on Facebook: Christ, we're in Day 21 of Biden Must Go, by people who have had 21 days to anoint the replacement and build the campaign and start raising the money and they don't actually have a plan or a campaign or money, so far as I can tell. Or a candidate, but they're still eager to push Biden out. This does not make sense to me. And it's outrageous to complain about Biden's polling numbers after three weeks of doing everything they can to crash them. Obviously I'll support whoever runs against the authoritarians, but destroying the campaign and candidate you have for one you'd like to have but cannot come up with does not seem brilliant. Meanwhile the grotesque parade of hate, lies, criminals and plans of harm to immigrants, women, democracy, and the environment goes on at the RNC largely unremarked.
She also writes in an article in Lit Hub that it is an editorial choice to speculate on what Biden’s health will be like in four years rather than what the health of the country will be if he and Harris do not win. To state the obvious, insisting over and over and over that a candidate is weak and cannot win weakens them and makes it less likely they will win.
Phillip Bump, national columnist focused largely on the numbers behind politics for WaPo, wrote on Wednesday to be wary of polls. He writes Just as questions about Biden’s age and fitness aren’t going to dissipate between now and Election Day, neither will the fact that he isn’t Trump and doesn’t have Trump’s liabilities. Barring some dramatic shift in how voters view Trump — a shift that would presumably be measurable soon, given both the assassination attempt over the weekend and the ongoing Republican convention — Biden’s not-Trumpness will continue to be an asset until voting is complete.
Even our old fave, Bernie Sanders, weighs in with I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected. Why? Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Mr. Trump — a demagogue and pathological liar. It’s time to learn a lesson from the progressive and centrist forces in France who, despite profound political differences, came together this week to soundly defeat right-wing extremism.
Now he is isolating from COVID. And since I started writing on Wednesday, the dominoes seem to be tumbling fast. Swapping out the top of the ticket this late in the race would be a drastic move, with unpredictable consequences. There is no consensus within the party on who should replace Biden, nor how exactly to go about it. There has been little indication in polling, too, that an alternative candidate would fare significantly better against Trump than Biden — a point the president and his close advisers have wielded in trying to tamp down the intra-party rebellion.
Jonathan V. Last, writing for the Bulwark, makes a compelling argument that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee and that Biden will withdraw while simultaneously being part of a choreographed handoff in which the entire party structure unites around her. Harris is a credible messenger for this pitch because she is a black woman who is a generation younger than Trump and Biden. She embodies change from the status quo. But simultaneously, she has enough experience to play as tested. She’s been a senator and a vice president. Her candidacy does not ask voters to take a chance on a young, untested quantity.
Again I’ll vote for a Vitamix blender before a Republican gets my vote. As of this morning there’s no telling where the winds will blow.
3.
Kirsten Engel is running against MAGA Juan Ciscomani in Arizona this year. My friend Michael Herzmark in Los Angeles has been in touch with Engel’s team and created the video below…share it!
4.
And in Kansas and Missouri, there are clergy speaking at rallies with the intention of awakening folks to the threat of white Christian nationalism and press for wider appreciation of how democracy could be damaged by a movement intent on undermining inclusive communities. The Rev. Bobby Love of Second Baptist Church in Olathe said “Together we must reject the notion of placing one race above the other. We must reject the notion of intolerance. We must reject the notion of violence under the banner of Christianity.”
Rev. Chris Wilson, who serves the congregation at Saint Andrew Christian Church of Olathe, said “Christian nationalism is not a religion. Christian nationalism is a political ideology that is distorted. White Christian nationalism is a distorted ideology that seeks to pressure and misuse the term Christian to forward a system that enlarges power and privilege to those that already have it.”
These rallies are organized by MORE2 (Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity) which is a Kansas City-based, nonpartisan social justice organization committed to transforming communities. The organization included members of different faith traditions, cultural backgrounds, races and economic means.
Spreading the word that Christian Nationalism Is Not Synonymous With Christianity is a worthy goal. At the end of the day, Christian nationalism asserts that God loves America – white, conservative, fundamentalist Christian America – more than other nations and more than other people. That concept is repulsive to many believers. Cynthia Miller-Idress, a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, said “Let me be clear, Christian nationalism is not Christianity. Nor is it ordinary patriotism or mere pride in being American. It is a perversion of both Christianity and patriotism.”
5.
I haven’t been posting much artwork recently as this most recent piece was quite time intensive. I’m calling it Gina, which is a followup to my song Gina Lollobrigida recorded almost 20 years ago.
Gina, Mixed Media, 25” x 14” x 14”, 2024
6.
And now…
Lots of good stuff here ... and Gina! So lovely.